Pun Salad

‘Send her back!” they chanted, meaning Representative Ilhan Omar, the Somalia-born Jew-hating weirdo elected to Congress by the ghastly fruitcakes who run things in Minneapolis. President Donald J. Trump, elected president by the ghastly nut cutlets who run things in much of the rest of the country, basked in the chant, glowing like a gopher sauntering forth from Chernobyl — he was, in effect, hearing his own daft words shouted back at him ecstatically, and he has a real weakness for that sort of thing.

Much has been made about whether the episode and Trump’s words inspiring it were racist; my own view is that Donald Trump is incapable of being a racist in the traditional sense of that word, because racism is derived from a perverted and misapplied sense of loyalty, a sentiment from which President Trump is manifestly immune. What is more interesting — and more troubling — is what the exchange says about our eroding sense of citizenship.

In his poem “New Hampshire,” Robert Frost once called his home “a most restful state.” But these days, New Hampshire’s tightknit poetry community is anything but restful. “I don’t want to pussyfoot anymore,” said Marie Harris, a former state poet laureate. “We tried our best not to be confrontational, and not to splash it all over the news, but the time has come.” At issue is a controversial nominee for state laureate, private negotiations with a governor who says he’s “not a poetry expert,” and a bit of verse that an elected official described to me as “a misogynistic poem about sex with Condoleezza Rice on Air Force One.”

As described in a 1967 state statute, the selection process for poet laureate is supposed to work like this: A nonprofit organization called the Poetry Society of New Hampshire evaluates nominations for the position and then makes a recommendation to the governor. The governor takes the nomination to the state’s five-person executive council and then formally makes the appointment. The five-year position comes with a $500 annual stipend from the Poetry Society and the honor of joining a distinguished list of New Hampshire state poet laureates that has included nationally known writers like Donald Hall, Maxine Kumin, and Jane Kenyon.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D–Calif.) rejected a White House offer on Friday to cut $150 billion in federal spending over 10 years as a part of a possible deal to raise the debt ceiling.

Now, $150 billion might sound like a large amount of money. But relative to how much money the federal government is set to spend over the next 10 years, the White House's proposed cut is roughly equivalent to deciding you'll eat one fewer Chipotle burrito per month for the next decade. That's not going to pay off a maxed-out credit card.

The fact that Pelosi rejected such a comically small reduction without even giving her colleagues the chance to consider it tells you all you need to know about the state of fiscal responsibility in Washington right now.

Responding to news that journalist Andy Ngo had been beaten by antifa protestors in Portland last month, a woman named Charlotte Clymer tweeted that “Ngo intentionally provokes people on the left to drive his content. Being attacked today on video taken by an actual journalist (because Ngo is definitely not) is the greatest thing that could have happened to his career. You know it. I know it. He knows it. We all know it. Violence is completely wrong, and I find it sad and weak to allow a sniveling weasel like Andy Ngo to get under one’s skin like this, but I’m also not going to pretend this wasn’t Ngo’s goal from the start. I mean, let’s cut the shit here. This is what they do.”

Who is Charlotte Clymer? She is an activist who works at the Human Rights Campaign, America’s “largest LGBTQ civil rights organization,” which supposedly “envision[s] a world where LGBTQ people are ensured equality at home, at work [and] in every community.” Andy Ngo, who has written for Quillette, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post and other publications, happens to be gay. So this is where we are right now: A staffer for a human-rights organization dedicated to helping gay people is publicly cheering the beating of a gay man. This should raise an eyebrow.

Many thinkers in the Russell-Shaw sense are crazy. Independent, intellectual reflection leads to craziness, and intelligence is no defense against it. Conformity, however, is a defense against craziness — at least certain kinds of craziness that would otherwise be common.

One can cite extreme cases, such as the Unabomber, who tried to start some kind of anti-technology revolution by sending mail bombs to scientists. Before his criminal career, he was a brilliant UC Berkeley mathematics professor. (Not just a regular math professor, which is already very smart, but an exceptional one.) But then he started thinking about … industrial society and its future. Which led him to radical conclusions, which led him to start a campaign of terrorism, and landed him in prison for life. (Evolution is an asshole, so it doesn’t care that he killed and maimed other people. But it was predictable that other people would respond with force, which tends to reduce one’s reproductive success.)

Other nations are founded on battle, blood, territory, nationality, culture, and language. Not America… We’re founded on happiness.

It’s right there in America’s IPO, in the first sentence of the main body of the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

No talk of happiness appears in England’s Magna Carta. The French Revolution’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen fails to address the subject. The European Union’s proposed constitution never mentions happiness, although, at 485 pages, it mentions practically everything else, including regulatory specifications for “edible meat offal” and “lard and other rendered pig fat.”

When the EU constitution was rejected by French voters (“Sacré bleu! Vous ne pas tell us how to make ze lard!”), it was replaced by the Treaty of Lisbon that also makes no reference to happiness (or even edible meat offal).